Research Projects in AustLit

AustLit is the most comprehensive record of Australia's literary and storytelling history and culture. AustLit supports and publishes the results of scholarship and research into Australia's cultural heritage.

Research projects supported by AustLit are designed to extend and share knowledge about Australia's cultural history by adding rich and diverse content streams while supporting scholarship in specific fields.

We welcome approaches from scholars and others to discuss ideas that might form new Research Projects or which make use of the AustLit infrastructure to organise, analyse and present research findings.

Explore the Research Projects

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World War I in Australian Literary Culture

World War I in Australian Literary Culture is an AustLit research project expanding our coverage of the way the 1914-1918 war has appeared in literature, film, and other forms of storytelling from the conflict's beginning to the present.

BlackWords

The BlackWords project was launched in 2007 by Uncle Sam Watson. The first national coordinator was Dr Anita Heiss who has remained an important champion of the work we do in recording biographical, bibliographical, and general information about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers and storytellers and their continuing practice of Indigenous culture across the country. BlackWords contains records for published and unpublished books, stories, plays, poems, and secondary works associated with eligible writers and storytellers and includes works in English, in translations, and in Australian languages. Team members contextualise Australia's historical timeline by adding information on ancient stories and songs.

Readers are advised that BlackWords contains images of people who have died.

Trauma Texts

Trauma Texts is a specialist AustLit Research Project investigating trauma in Australian life narratives. It explores literary representations of individual, family or communal trauma in auto/biographical writing from 1990 to 2015.

Popular Fiction Projects

Explore the links below to discover how, for example, medieval themes appear in contemporary Australian popular novels, or where we hope to go with our examination of other popular fiction collections.

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Australian Popular Fictions is the umbrella term for a number of ongoing, related projects that explore popular fiction and fiction genres.

Australian Popular Medievalism explores medievalism in contemporary adult popular fiction by means of a dataset of annotated bibliographical records which rate the directness and penetration of medieval ideas and images.

Speculations is a substantial study of Australian popular fiction. The research – which defines speculative fiction as including science fiction, horror, and fantasy – is focused on expanding the recognition of the important place 'popular' fiction has in Australian storytelling culture.

Pulp Fiction focuses on rendering more visible Australia's tradition of radio serials, comics, romance, crime, western, science, horror, and sports fiction, especially the work of some of the most successful and prolific authors, by mapping Australia's popular publishing industry between 1939 and 1959.

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Banned in Australia

This research presents the impact of censorship on reading in Australia between 1901 and 1973. By collecting details of literary publications that were prohibited as imports into twentieth-century Australia, it traces the main arc of federal publications censorship. The bibliography relies on the documented evidence of department and agency practice held by the National Archives of Australia. It has an international scope and includes titles from all over the world, including works by Australian writers published abroad.

Drama and Theatre Projects

Explore the thousands of theatre works listed in AustLit through these projects.

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The Australian Drama Archive is a developing collection of plays and performance texts that will be developed over the coming years. Using plays held in the Eunice Hanger Collection at the library of The University of Queensland, and in the Campbell Howard Collection at the University of New England, a group of theatre historians are throwing light on the rich history of early twentieth century Australian theatre.

Australian Popular Theatre was established in 2006 with a focus on variety theatre of the 19th and early 20th century. It provides information on a large number of Australian-based stage artists and writers. It also covers the scripts, designers, entrepreneurs, and others in this rich area of popular culture history.

Australian Drama project demonstrates a concerted effort to identify and record Australian drama and theatre works, articles, and reviews of both published and performed. We aim to collect first and later production information and do not limit our information to published plays or theatre pieces.

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Screen Projects

These projects explore the rich history of screenwriting in Australia, from silent film, through talkies and early television, to the mini-series of the 1980s and the big-budget productions of the twenty-first century.

Australians and Adaptations (1900-2014): a broad-reaching exhibition that aims to give an overview of the way in which Australian writers have adapted materials for the screen and from the screen. Includes sections on Australians working in the US and the UK, silent films, adaptations of Australian material in other countries, television and adaptation, and frequently adapted works. (Supported by the ARC Discovery grant for Media Transformation in its Australian and International Contexts: Analysis and Theory-building.)

Projects on Children's and YA Lit.

These projects explore the rich history of children's literature in Australia, including full-text versions of some out-of-print children's books.

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Asian Australian Children's Literature and Publishing investigates and records details of Australian children’s literature either set in Asia, works that contain Asian-Australian content or characters, works that represent Asian-Australian cultures and experiences, as well as hundreds of Australian works that have been translated into at least one Asian language.

Australian Children's Literature includes records of works of fiction, poetry and drama written for children and young adults by Australian authors. It includes reviews of these works, information about their authors, information about organisations involved in the creation and publication of Australian children's literature and critical articles on Australian children's literature.

Children's Literature and the Environment includes a variety of records (fiction, information books, film, poetry, and multimedia) relevant to children and young adults that deal with the environment in imaginative, scientific, educational, and creative ways.

Reading in the Victorian Classroom provides information on the Victorian Readers, a series of school readers produced between 1927 and 1930 for school children in Victoria and used (with revisions) until the 1950s.

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Regional Literature and Writers

Over the years, AustLit has been used to compile collections of data relating to particular geographical regions in Australia. Some of these projects have been underway for many decades.

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South Australian Women Writers includes biographical and bibliographical information on South Australian women writers associated with South Australia by birth, residence or visits to the state.

Northern Territory Literature began opening up the comparatively unexplored literature associated with the Northern Territory and northern Western Australia as areas of specific AustLit research focus.

North Western Australian Literature, like Northern territory Literature, began opening up the comparatively unexplored literature associated with the Northern Territory and northern Western Australia as areas of specific AustLit research focus.

Writing the Tropical North examines features that, in general, distinguish the literature of the Australian tropics from works produced in more temperate southern zones.

Literature of Tasmania provides bibliographical information about all aspects of writing in and about Tasmania and also Van Diemen's Land, as Tasmania was formerly called.

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Projects on Belonging and Leaving

This collection of projects explore and give access to data that deals writing in and from an Australian perspective.

In addition to BlackWords, the collection includes the following projects:

Australian Literary Responses to Asia provides information on Australian creative writing about or referring to Asia, and some Australian critical responses to the literatures of Asian countries.

Australian Multicultural Writers includes biographical information about Australian writers who identify with cultural heritages other than Anglo-Celtic (both non-English-speaking and English-speaking).

Asylum Seeker Narratives lists works that include or examine first-person accounts of people seeking asylum in Australia..

Windows on Australia aims to advance understanding of Australia’s global role in literary production and clarify the marketability of Australian cultural exports to non-English-speaking countries..

Reverse Diaspora is the first historically comprehensive, detailed examination of expatriate Australian writers at work in Britain..

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Print Culture Projects

These projects explore aspects of print culture in Australia, from convict narratives to magazines to distribution patterns.

Reading by Numbers uses AustLit records to explore Australian literary and publishing history from a quantitative perspective.

Hidden Treasures of the Mitchell Library collects together a selection of sixty-two enhanced AustLit records for magazines whose contents expose an extraordinary diversity of opinion and commentary on the many activities of domestic, social, cultural, and political life.

Australian Newspaper Reviews of 1930 began from the premise that the academic study of literature – traditionally the focus of studies of individual writers' reputations – is only one part of a broader and more complex 'ecology' of literature, and that the circulation and reception of texts can productively be analysed in the light of this larger context.

Convict Narratives will bring together literary works and print artefacts dealing with the Australian penal colonies that were published in the long nineteenth century..

The Joseph Furphy Archive aims to provide greater access for more people to the material that lies behind Furphy's fiction and poetry. It is AustLit's first foray into scholarly editions publishing.

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Reading Projects

These projects explore various aspects of reading, from Copyright Australia's Reading Australia resource trails to questions of translation.

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Reading Australia collects together an increasing number of resource trails on key Australian works, under the auspices of Copyright Australia.

Reading by Numbers mined, visualised and modelled data from AustLit to produce a study that revises established conceptions of Australian literary history.

Resourceful Reading aimed to re-examine and re-invigorate Australian literary criticism and history by integrating traditional, qualitative approaches to literary studies with empirically-rich methodologies including data-mining and quantitative analysis.

From the first Aboriginal newspaper in 1836 to the advent of social media, from Blue Hills to The Chaser, from astrology to women in the media, this is an essential Companion for everyone with a serious interest in those who decide what we read, hear and watch every day. Hundreds of interlinked narratives – from brief entries to essays – explore media organisations, genres and regions along with key players and significant issues.

Including newspapers, magazines, radio, television, film and advertising, the MAP database focuses on private and lesser-known archives, held by companies, peak bodies, community groups and individuals. Each archive record contains descriptive information of the archive, plus links to related online material.

A research outcome of Dr Catriona Mills's 2012 AFI Research Collection (AFIRC) Research Fellowship, the project is a collection of AustLit records based on the Crawford Collection at the AFI Research Collection at RMIT.

This exhibition explores the way in which Australian newspapers marketed the silent-film era through pictorial advertisements, portraits of silent-film stars, and publicity stills harvested from contemporary newspapers.

The Colonial Newspapers and Magazines Project (CNMP) focuses on the literary content of periodicals published during Australia's colonial era (1788–1900 inclusive) and the literary culture of the colonial period. The project began in 2009, across three universities.

Undertaken by Professor Leigh Dale and researcher Robert Thomson, this project began from the premise that the academic study of literature – traditionally the focus of studies of individual writers' reputations – is only one part of a broader and more complex 'ecology' of literature, and that the circulation and reception of texts can productively be analysed in the light of this larger context.

Undertaken by Professor David Carter, AustLit director Kerry Kilner, and Dr Roger Osborne, this project is a collection of bio-historical entries on approximately 100 Australian magazines and journals, funded by the ARC.

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Bibliography: The Last in History?

The Bibliography of Australian Literature was one of AustLit's foundation projects. Three of the four volumes were compiled in and extracted from AustLit between 2000 and 2008. It may well be the last national bibliography to be published in print.